


The Dog Star

by strictlysomething



Category: Captain America (Movies), Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: A man out of time and let's be honest, Gen, Sirius Black Lives, The Tesseract (Marvel), out of his god damn mind
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-24
Updated: 2018-08-24
Packaged: 2019-07-01 20:41:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15781725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strictlysomething/pseuds/strictlysomething
Summary: Passage between worlds was not quick. No. It was a slow never-ending free fall of twists and turns in a pitch so dark, most of the time he couldn’t make out his hand in front of his face, let alone what surrounded him as he fell.But like all things, it eventually came to an end, if in an unexpected place.





	The Dog Star

**Author's Note:**

> This was found in the recesses of my hard drive as I did a little spring cleaning. Writing is circa 2013.

Passage between worlds was not quick. No. It was a slow never-ending free fall of twists and turns in a pitch so dark, most of the time he couldn’t make out his hand in front of his face, let alone what surrounded him as he fell.

Trapped souls made of faded mist stirred around the barriers of the Veil as he fell through but they disappeared in spiraling waves when disturbed, like fog in sunlight. They reached for him at first. He’d heard them call out in strange whispers of thought, _come, follow_ , entreating him to come closer so that they could pull him sideways into their domain. But his momentum, no doubt aided by his dear cousin’s curse, pushed him forward and he found himself falling through the mist and into darkness and eventually even the whispers faded away. Try as he might, no words left his lips, no spells left his wand, and his movement was limited to flailing his limbs as he spun around a darkened abyss. No matter how far he reached he never so much as brushed against anything else as he fell. Time, if it even existed in his condition, passed and he continued to fall.

He grasped tightly onto his wand, useless as it was, as an anchor against the pitch black, but eventually he must’ve let go. Between one moment and the next, the familiar wood was no longer within his grasp. The first realization that it was gone was painful, a silent cry of anguish that couldn’t escape his throat, but slowly it became harder to notice, to remember what it was that he’d lost in the first place. Existence became a faint murmur of idle memory lost in the darkness and shadow and constricted space as he fell forward and down.

He struggled to hold on to the pieces of himself that he could. The physical remnants stayed with him the longest. The last breath he’d taken, to laugh and taunt and maybe call out to someone dear, remained trapped in his lungs and tasted of dust and stone and blood at the back of his throat. The throbbing remnants of a curse that curled across his ribs, ripping and tearing into muscle and sinew, pulsed in a silent reminder.

It didn’t take long, or maybe it took centuries before the bits and pieces of himself that he’d tried to patch together after Azkaban flaked away. Mantras to hold on, to wait just a little longer wore thin, and walls crumbled slowly at first, and then in a flood. Cold crept into his limbs, darkness wrapped in a hood that pulled at his soul and ate everything else, leaving a dark pit behind. Memories blurred together and became lost amongst screaming and crying and death and betrayal.

Images of a life half forgotten played on repeat, stuttering and skipping over like a broken record that had been played to many times, sometimes familiar sometimes not. A rat. The crunch of hollow bones and feathers in a dog’s jaw. Laughter that turned into screams that turned into silence. A baby crying, _“Sirius, meet Harry James Potter,”_ and tears that felt happy and sad at once. A boy with glasses, _james no harry no james_ , and he was smiling and laughing as the maggots ate at his flesh and skin sagged off his bones, glasses hanging from mangled face. _His fault his fault._ Taunts and laughter and a castle in the distance. It was burning, it all burned and burned and he did nothing to stop it. A wand held in a pale hand pointed down and pain so much pain, _remember what it is to be a Black_. Colors, once bright and vibrant, faded to a washed out grey. Sound was muffled, distorted and shaky, and nothing felt real. A boy, the image washed thin with pieces missing, his hair wild and his eyes, _what color were his eyes? Merlin, what color were his eyes?_ He had to get back to him, he had to get back.

A rat. The crunch of hollow bones and feathers in a dog’s jaw. Laughter that turned into screams that turned into silence. A baby crying and tears that felt happy and sad at once. A boy with glasses hanging from mangled face. _His fault his fault._  Taunts and laughter and a castle in the distance. It was burning, it all burned and burned. A wand held in a pale hand pointed down,  _remember what it is to be a Black_. Colors, once bright and vibrant, faded to a washed out grey. Sound was muffled, distorted and shaky, and nothing felt real. A boy, the image washed thin with pieces missing, his hair wild and his eyes,  _what color were his eyes? Merlin, what color were his eyes?_  He had to get back to him, he had to get back.

A rat. The crunch of hollow bones and feathers in a dog's jaw. A hooded figure with no face. A boy, a boy with dark hair and glasses. No, no _, what color were his eyes_. Laughter that turned to screams that turned to a boy. A boy with dark hair.

Eventually even the madness waned, leaving behind an unsettled serenity brought by an age of silence.

Occasionally, huge explosions of light across every spectrum flashed in beautiful, horrible clouds, briefly illuminating the barriers of his prison in impossible shapes and images. The sounds of drums shook like thunder and the crack of a mighty whip. The blaring cry of a thousand trumpets blasted from every direction, twisting and hurling his body through the uninterrupted fall. Windows, he thought, maybe even doors. Glimpses into places of being just out of reach. Different places or worlds, maybe even the same one over and over again. He longed to touch what lay beyond, but always found himself falling _down down down_ instead. Eventually the torrent passed, and it was back in to black and jarring silence.

_Please, just let it end._

It continued like that for an eternity until suddenly, something wet struck his cheek, and he opened his eyes slowly, blinking in a dull surprise. It had been so long since he’d felt the sensation, it took him a moment to identify it. Another drop struck his forehead as he raised a hand to feel the foreign slick substance. Suddenly a gust of frigid, cold wind cut through his clothes and dragged him along with it. Water, in tiny drops, fell with him and against him, soaking his robes and tingling against numb skin. His breath was trapped in caged lungs, air escaping too fast to be replaced. It took focus to remember what the sharp, twisting pain in his lungs cried for, to inhale and taste rain.

Explosions tore through the sky around him, illuminating dark foreign shapes, bright shards of light cutting across his vision, followed by a heavy metronomic beat from below. His body twisted and spun with the force of the pull downwards, and through the darkness his eyes traced movement of the faint silhouettes and surfaces highlighted momentarily in violent light and fire.

A mechanical whirring was his only warning as an object narrowly missed him to his left, a dark metallic contraption cutting across his vision as he fell past. Blinking again, eyes drawn to the monstrosity he twisted up, so his back was to the wind, to stare at the giant metallic underbelly above him, letting his limbs drift upwards, caught on the air. There was the silhouette of the thing cutting across the sky, stark against darkened clouds and open space, and it stirred up a presence in him that he hadn’t felt in a long time. He reached out with shaking fingers, as if he could touch the twinkling beads of light that glowed beyond a crease in the clouds and dark moving shapes. His hand closed on open air. For the first time in a long time, laughter bubbled up through his stomach, a foreign half dry crackle that pulled at unused muscles.

Suddenly, as if struck, the belly of the beast above him buckled and ripped, a fiery explosion that burned into his retinas pushing outward from its center as it began to break apart. A larger explosion caught and blew smaller pieces outwards, sending debris shooting past him. He recognized some of the debris as human in form, limp, in pieces. It was the most magnificent the most terrible thing he could ever remember seeing. Something small clipped his arm, nearly tore the limb from body and pain was so real and omnipresent he laughed again as he clutched at the throbbing limb with his other hand, warm liquid oozing up and drifting slowly above him.

As he fell, a seam of blue light suddenly formed around him, tendrils reaching out and loping around his limbs, whispering in his ear like a familiar friend even as it burned through skin and muscle and matter until nothing but the sound of his laughter remained.

Fifteen hundred miles away, in a darkened church lit by candles and torches brought by SS soldiers, blue light flickered once, twice, before energy coalesced in the center of the room, spinning in ungainly circles. Sharp bursts of electricity shattering the glass of the hanging lanterns and sparking into a small fire around the base of an ornate wall that shined with the glow of a mysterious blue cube of the same throbbing energy.

The shape of a man formed slowly, painfully, before the light disappeared in a sharp crack of blinding energy that dropped him to the ground, where he collapsed onto hands and knees, nearly crumpling under the weight. He breathed in slowly, wondrously, hands running over the thick grains of the wooden surface he lay on. A golden ring on his right hand snagged on the wood of the old floor and the sensation of resistance was odd. His left arm, robes ripped away to show red, torn flesh that oozed a dark viscous liquid and the curse in his side twisted and pulled in a fiery revival of pain and he’d never enjoyed being _alive_ so much.

It had been so long, his own magical core creaked and groaned and shook off dust as it rose up and expanded into the free space, a slight wind picking up around him as it flexed outward before sinking back into his skin with a satisfying murmur. Laughing again, the dry vibration slowly growing familiar in a throat untouched, he let himself truly savor the moment.

Sharp noises drew his attention outward and he noticed after one beat, two, that he wasn’t alone. Emotion swept over him as his eyes devoured the sight of multiple people, heartbeat heavy in his ears. The faces were unfamiliar, and like a raw nerve, he felt the absence of a boy with wild hair and glasses. He was important somehow, but he couldn’t hold on to him, he fumbled to remember until the thought was lost again.

A man stood in front of him, in black leather, with a metallic sigil on his left breast. His face was pale and brooding and he was speaking, saying sharp words in some unfamiliar language that tugged at memory.

He looked past the man briefly to study the rest of the large room; resting on a gaping hole blasted through the wall behind him, two more men in all black uniforms and holding long metallic objects pointed in his direction standing on the stone rubble. Another man, no, the body of a man that lay face down to his left, a pool of blood underneath him.

A stone wall, with ornate carvings of that grew and branched out to the ceiling was too his right. An open box was pulled out next to it, resting on marble and casting off an unnatural blue glow, and it called to him in the way the rest of the room didn’t. _Magic to magic._ Whispers of dark thought swept around him, enticing him in a foreign tongue, sending a hundred images of space and stars and energy _asking to be touched to be held_ and he inhaled shakily as the man in black stepped in front of the box, blocking it from his vision. He ripped his eyes away from the quiet hum of power and drew them back up to the man’s face, who was studying him sharply.

It had been a long time since he’d needed them, and it took him several tries to mouth the words correctly, muscles pulling unnaturally along his face, but eventually he managed to ask, “Where am I?”

The eyes of the man before him sharpened as he spoke, his mouth twisting upwards, and he responded, with a slight accent, “English, then. Interesting. How did you get here?”

He felt his eyes move back to where the box was behind the man, frowning, before glancing back up. The man tracked his movements narrowly, “You,” he tried again, pulling the words forward slowly, “did not summon me?” He looked to the body of the man to his left, wondering if it had been him, instead.

The man tilted his head at his wording and stepped forward, drawing his eyes back to him.

“The Tesseract’s power drew you here as soon as it was found. Hydra,” he emphasized assertively, strangely intent, “has taken possession of it and all of its power _._ ”

 _Tesseract. Hydra._ The words had no meaning.

“I wonder, it had seemed foolish to have left only a church keeper as such a treasure’s guardian. Are you of Asgard? A protector, or a guide, perhaps, sent by Odin himself?” The questions were asked with a considered weight, as if the man was trying to include his unexpected appearance into some prior understanding.

 _Odin_. _Asgard._ None of it sounded familiar, he certainly didn’t feel like a protector, he didn’t feel like much of anything, but he had lost so much with time. It was hard to recall, to bring forth old knowledge into the empty space at the forefront of his mind. “I,” he spoke, voice growing hoarse, “I do not know. I’ve been falling,” he felt a cold distance return just speaking of it, a shaking that started deep in his chest, "for so long. I don’t remember. . .”

A rat. The crunch of hollow bones and feathers in a dog’s jaw. Laughter that turned into screams that turned into silence. A boy, _a boy_. Flashes that barely felt real, slipping from mind like water.

“Then we will remember together,” The man spoke again, certainty ringing in his voice, lips twisted into a cold smile. “Do you have a name?”

He mused over the question, tasting it on his tongue as he sought an answer within the emptiness inside of him. But there was nothing, only darkness.

“Black,” he gave the answer idly, the color of his ever present prison. It seemed fitting.  

“You will come with us, then, Mr. Black.”

The other man’s eyes were piercing, cruel as he snapped his fingers, speaking over his shoulder in the sharp language from earlier. Two more soldiers stepped forward from behind the rubble, moving to collect him. “I do hope you enjoy your stay.”

**Author's Note:**

> A realistic person would say this will probably stay a oneshot but dreamers can dream. Once upon a time I had plans.


End file.
